Nine Unexplained Mysteries of the World

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The Tunguska Explosion over Siberia The Tunguska impact event is one of the great mysteries of modern history. The basic facts are well known. On 30 June 1908, a vast and powerful explosion engulfed an isolated region of Siberia near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. The blast was 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, registered 5 on the Richter scale and is thought to have knocked down some 80 million trees over an area of 2000 square kilometres. The region is so isolated, however, that historians recorded only one death and just a handful of eyewitness reports. But the most mysterious aspect of this explosion is that it left no crater and scientists have long argued over what could have caused it. The generally accepted theory is that the explosion was the result of a meteorite or comet exploding in the Earth’s atmosphere which could have caused an explosion of this magnitude without leaving a crater. Such an event would almost certainly have showered the region with fragments of the parent body but no convincing evidence has ever emerged. In the 1930s, an expedition to the region led by the Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik returned with a sample of melted glassy rock containing bubbles. Kulik considered this evidence of an impact event. But the sample was somehow lost and has never undergone modern analysis. As such, there is no current evidence of an impact in the form of meteorites. The area of greatest interest for meteor scientists is called the Suslov depression, which lies directly beneath the location of the air blast and is the place where meteorite debris was most likely to fall. Dig into the peat bogs there and you can easily find layers that show clear evidence of an explosion. Andrei Zlobin from the Russian Academy of Sciences said he dug more than ten prospect holes in the hopes of finding meteorite fragments, but without success. However, during an expedition in 1988 he had more luck. While exploring the bed of the local Khushmo River, where stones are likely to collect over a long period of time, he was able to find and collect close to 100 interesting specimens. He returned to Moscow with them, but for some unexplained reason, waited 20 years to examine them in detail. In 2008, he sorted through the collection and came across three stones with thumblike impressions on their surface and clear evidence of melting. Zlobin used tree ring evidence to estimate the temperatures that the blast had created on the ground and says that they were not high enough to melt rocks on the surface. However, the fireball in the Earth’s atmosphere could have been hot enough to do it. Zlobin concluded that the rocks he had found were fragments of whatever body collided with Earth that day. What do YOU think?

Crop Circles The sun sets on a field in southern England. When it rises again the following morning, that field has been transformed into an enormous work of art. A large section of the crop has been tamped into a pattern of circles, rings, and other intricate geometric shapes. The edge is so clean that it looks like it was created with a machine. Even though the stalks are bent, they are not damaged. Sometimes, the patterns are simple circles. In other instances, they are elaborate designs consisting of several interconnecting geometric shapes. Farmers have reported finding strange circles in their fields for centuries. The earliest mention of a crop circle dates back to the 1500s.